Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [75]
A famous piece of advice to writers is, “Do tons of research, then throw it away and start writing.” Wallace reversed this piece of folk wisdom. He did (or caused to have done) tons of research and incorporated it wholesale into his novels. Ungainly as the results were, they worked, perhaps because it is part of our Puritan inheritance to want to believe that we are being instructed, that we are learning something, anything, even while we are being entertained. Thus, although Wallace titillated his readers with sex scenes (none of them quite as hot as those of Robbins, a source of great envy to Wallace; in Robbins’s view, Wallace tended to write about sex as if he had never actually experienced it), he also gave them an opportunity to atone for their lascivious pleasure by reading what amounted to a whole travel book about whatever city the plot was set in, including the dimensions of every significant monument or work of art. It was like reading in alternate bursts from The Joy of Sex and a Baedeker’s travel guide.
Wallace had had a relatively tame career as a nonfiction writer at Knopf and had then published a fairly unsuccessful and undistinguished novel with a minor publisher before being brought to Paul Gitlin’s attention (though for a while, oddly, his agent was the stuffy and conservative Paul Reynolds, while Gitlin was his lawyer). Wallace had a positive mania for just those parts of publishing a book that bore or irritate most writers. He loved correcting proofs, indulged in deep, obscure arguments with the copy editors over knotty questions of punctuation, spelling, and accuracy, and rejoiced when he could prove them wrong. A loyal graduate of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, school system, he actually kept his old high school English teacher, Elizabeth Kempthorne, on his payroll to go over his manuscripts and proofs.
I was, in fact, drafted to work with Wallace by Schwed precisely because Wallace dearly loved the whole experience of being edited. The more pages of detailed notes Schwed and I threw at Wallace, the happier he was. “Don’t skimp!” he would plead—I was to play devil’s advocate to the hilt, without any respect for his feelings. Unfortunately, Wallace was so hypersensitive to criticism that he sometimes cried when contemplating a list of suggested cuts. Moreover, he invariably turned down every suggestion, however minor. His replies to editorial notes were usually two or three times the length of the notes themselves, full-blooded, single-spaced rebuttals, point by point, page by page. The first time this happened, I called Gitlin and asked him if he knew what happened and could explain what my role was intended to be. “Sure, kid,” he said affably. “Your job is to make Irving feel good by doing a really thorough edit of his stuff. Then he gets to prove that he’s smarter than you are, even if you did go to Oxford.”
“It seems like a waste of time.”
“What waste of time? It keeps you busy, it makes Irving happy. That’s why I asked for you to work with him. I figured the more he turns your stuff down, the more you’ll do. You two are made for each other, bubbi, trust me on that.”
This proved to be true. For years, I continued to send Wallace long, detailed,